In the 5G era, centralized mobility management raises the issue of traffic concentration on the mobility anchor. Distributed mobility management is expected to be a solution for this issue, as it moves mobility anchor functions to multiple edge routers. However, it incurs path stretch and redundant traffic on the backhaul links. Although these issues were not considered important in the 3G/4G era, they are expected to be a serious problem in the 5G era. In this paper, we design a routing-based mobility management mechanism to address the above problems. The mechanism integrates distributed routing with Bloom Filters and an anchor-less scheme where edge routers work as mobility anchors. Simulations show that the proposed mechanism achieves a good balance between redundant traffic on the backhaul links and routing overhead.

Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) defines Internet Protocol (IP) mobility which does not depend on centralized manipulation. DMM leads to the abatement of non-optimal routing, a single point of failure, and scalability problems appearing in centralized Mobility Management (MM). The fact that most DMM schemes are in the proposal phase and non-existence of a standardization, urge to investigate the proposed schemes thoroughly to confirm their capabilities and thereby, to determine the best candidate practice for DMM. This paper examines five novel DMM proposals discussed in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) using router-level Internet Service Provider (ISP) topologies of Sprint (USA), Tiscali (Europe), Telstra (AUS), and Exodus (USA), as user mobility within an ISP network is considered the most realistic and recurrent user movement in the modern scope. Results reflect behavioral differences of schemes depending on the network. ISPs closer to the Internet core with high density of Point of Presences (PoPs) such as Sprint show poorer outcome when centralized anchors/controllers are employed while Proxy Mobile IP (PMIP) based enhancements offer higher reliability. In contrast, smaller ISPs that reside farther away from the Internet core yield better performance with SDN-Based and Address Delegation schemes. Although the PMIP-Based DMM schemes perform better during handover, their outturn is trivialized due to higher latency in the data plane. In contrast, the Address Delegation and SDN-Based schemes have excessive cost and latency in performing handover due to routing table updates, but perform better in data plane, suggesting that control/data plane split may best address the optimal routing.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been actively standardizing distributed mobility management (DMM) schemes with multiple Mobility Anchors (MAs). Yet, all existing schemes have limitations that preclude the efficient distribution of mobile data traffic, including single point failure problems, heavy tunneling overheads between MAs, and a restrictive traffic distribution for external nodes in a mobility domain. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient mobility management scheme with a virtual Local Mobility Anchor (vLMA). While the vLMA is designed assuming multiple replicated LMAs for a PMIPv6 domain, it acts virtually as a single LMA for the internal and external nodes in the PMIPv6 domain. Furthermore, the vLMA distributes mobile data traffic using replicated LMAs, and routes packets via a replicated LMA on the optimal routing path. Performance evaluations confirm that the proposed scheme can distribute mobile data traffic more efficiently and reduce the end-to-end packet delay than the Distributed Local Mobility Anchor (DLMA) and the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6).

Mobile IPv6 is an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard which permits node mobility in IPv6. To manage mobility, it establishes a centralized mediator, Home Agent (HA), which inevitably introduces several penalties like triangular routing, single point of failure and limited scalability. Some later extensions such as Global HAHA, which employed multiple HAs, made to alleviate above shortcomings by introducing Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) approach. However, Multiple HA model will not be beneficial, unless the HAs are located finely. But, no major research paper has focused on locating HAs. This paper examines impact of single and multiple HA placements in data plane, by using an Autonomous System (AS) level topology consisting of 30,000 nodes with several evaluation criteria. All possible placements of HA(s) are analysed on a fair, random set of 30,000 node pairs of Mobile Nodes (MN) and Correspondent Nodes (CN). Ultimate result provides a concise account of different HA placements: i.e. cost centrality interprets performance variation better than degree centrality or betweenness. 30,000 ASs are classified into three groups in terms of Freeman's closeness index and betweenness centrality: 1) high range group, 2) mid range group, and 3) low range group. Considering dual HA placement, if one HA is placed in an AS in the high range group, then any subsequent HA placement gives worse results, thus single HA placement is adequate. With the mid range group, similar results are demonstrated by the upper portion of the group, but the rest yields better results when combined with another HA. Finally, from the perspective of low range group, if the subsequent HA is placed in the high range group, it gives better result. On the other hand, betweenness based grouping yields varying results. Consequently, this study reveals that the Freeman's closeness index is most appropriate in determining impacts of HA placements among considered indices.